Some would argue that giving everyone a day off saved government money in terms of waste, liability and so forth. That is a reasonable explanation, but it also begs the question: Why can’t this broke government implement a four-day workweek when it is clear that it won’t pose any difficulty for the public? Essential services, of course, must continue, requiring that certain employees will be exempted, but the monthly savings should amount to approximately $1 million.
This and other tough decisions regarding personnel payroll will have to be made by the CNMI government and its officials. Federalization will have a huge impact on the local economy. No one has yet evaluated the immediate and long-term consequences to government revenues, but they will be big, and government employees staging protests on Capital Hill will be the least of the problems facing elected officials.
More bad news
POLITICIANS love to talk about training and certification plans for U.S. citizens, but even Northern Marianas College, with its earmarks for vocational education, wasn’t able to accomplish this in nearly 20 years. The Public School System, for its part, had pumped out students that weren’t able to pass vocational education classes and didn’t have enough of the fundamentals to take the GED so hybrid credentials were developed, which didn’t teach much of anything.
For-profit training schools have cropped up but there is minimal licensure requirement so there is no independent certification that these establishments actually teach what they claim to teach and that their students actually have a mastery of the subject matter in their particular field.
The cost of recruiting technical and professional personnel has just increased by leaps and bounds, and, under federalization, the process could take years unless you are prepared to recruit U.S. citizens from the states. How many of the hard-pressed local businesses can afford to do that? A lot of nonresidents in non-technical and professional fields are likely to be sent home after two years of the transition period that will begin in November. What do you think will happen to the remaining businesses in the CNMI?
Hard decisions regarding the CNMI workforce were postponed for quite a while and now they will be imposed from afar with little regard for the consequences locally.
Questions to the administration
TRUE to his word, the governor declared a state of emergency, indicating that he would submit a plan to take care of hospital problems in the prescribed number of days. One has to wonder why he didn’t have such a plan at the very beginning of his administration.
This newest announcement, in any case, raises questions about the constitutionality of declaring a state of emergency to tackle management problems. Note, too, that the secretary of the Department of Public Health and the hospital administrator are still on board and collecting their salaries even though the governor stated in his declaration that problems at the hospital may have caused deaths.
Where is the accountability of the individuals in charge of the hospital? And what kind of savings is the governor anticipating by going to the Philippines to recruit non-certified physicians? What happens to federal funding and the remaining physicians if the CNMI government adopts this approach?
